Doctors once told Kyle O’Reilly that a career in sports-entertainment would be impossible because of diabetes.
Now he’s an NXT Tag Team Champion and using his platform to spread awareness about the disease.
With November being National Diabetes Awareness Month, O’Reilly took the opportunity to open up about living with type 1 diabetes on Instagram, sharing an image of the continuous glucose monitor (CGM) he wears on his arm.
“I’ve never been super candid or vocal about living with type 1 diabetes but since November is Diabetes Awareness Month, I figured it was my responsibility to share some things that may help somebody else,” he wrote.
“I know hard it can be living with diabetes,” O’Reilly added. “Injecting insulin or constantly stabbing your finger to test your blood at what always seems to be the prime inopportune moment. There are so many variables that make living with this disease difficult and every day is a struggle to maintain healthy blood sugars.”
A CGM allows for constant tracking of blood sugar levels, automatically collecting readings and determining trends and patterns to provide better insight into someone’s condition.
Writing that it “changed the game” for him, O’Reilly added that “having this device makes me feel like a cyborg, which is cool too.”
“This is a mental grind as much as it is a physical grind … take each day with a new perspective and chance to be better than you were yesterday,” he wrote.
O’Reilly, who is in the midst of his third reign with the NXT Tag Team Titles, will represent The Undisputed ERA and the black-and-gold brand with Bobby Fish when they take on Raw Tag Team Champions The Viking Raiders and SmackDown Tag Team Champions The Revival in a Triple Threat Tag Team Match at Survivor Series on Sunday, Nov. 24, live at 7 ET/4 PT on WWE Network.
